The USS Gerald R. Ford is capable of keeping airplanes in motion, yet toilets are not always operational. It is that contrast which makes the plumbing of the Ford so unholy within a vessel designed to display the advanced naval arts. The workload of the carrier has remained significant since its departure out of Norfolk in June 2025 and the vessel has remained in operation despite common breakdowns in a system that is accessed by every sailor several times per day. The naval stance has been consistent: the failures have not been experienced in terms of mission operations and outages are usually confined instead of being systemic.
The issue here revolves around the Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer system of the carrier, the network which utilizes suction and pressure to transport the sewage over the small pipes. The design was supposed to save on water and enhance sanitation over older gravity-based systems, but emails and internal documents have been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that show a shipboard reality of little things going wrong quickly. In a document issued by the Navy, which was not dated, it was said, “Every day that the entire crew is present on the ship, a trouble call has been made for ship’s force personnel to repair or unclog a portion of the VCHT system, since June 2023.”
The VCHT system by Ford is separated into ten autonomous areas serving over 600 toilet to avoid a domino effect by a single casualty. The spokesperson of Fleet Forces Command, Lt. Cmdr. David Carter, mentioned that disruptions were normally a singular event that can be resolved in any state of operationalness and usually requires 30 minutes to two hours, with other areas remaining in operation. Carter also blamed a lot of failures by poor items being put into the system, and mentioned that the requirements of maintenance reduced as the deployment advanced and planned more improvements to the maintenance availabilities in the future.
Nevertheless, it is evident in the documents that “isolated” is soon wearying when it occurs all the time.
The records showed an email by an engineering-department describing a system being mishandled and destroyed and technicians laboring 19 hours a day to meet the pace. A different message advised leaders on shipboards that they use heads before a scheduled shutdown was pursued in a particular area as a leak into space was sought. The waste carried off the lines indicates fewer items of an engineering bill of materials and rather a list of dorm-room contraband: t-shirts, brown paper towels, rope, and even commercial toilet paper. One of the common mechanical hassles mentioned in the documents is a valve at the rear of toilets that can be knocked out, slaughtering suction in an entire zone.
Then again there is the gradual scalaway culprit mineral scale. The system was “billed as undersized” by a 2020 Government Accountability Office evaluation, and the pipes were narrow enough to be blocked. The identical corpus of reporting attributed unremitting obstructions to calcium deposition in certain cases especially in low decks occasionally to need a special acidous flush, which can be conducted only in port. The GAO estimate regularly used in relation to that process is 400,000 per flush and records show that Ford has already gone through the procedure at least 10 times since 2023.
The larger engineering point is not that the Ford-class is “too modern,” but that failure modes with modernization are everywhere, particularly in the interaction of human behavior, maintenance manning and long, distributed piping routing. The flight-deck systems at Ford were always supposed to require an increase in reliability with time; the shock is that a concept of cruise ship inspired sanitation was a load magnet on a warship that was meant to run lean. One such planning-yard mail, the long tail of that fact, was: What we want to do is give you a temporary resolution… until such time 10+ years down the road… [the program office] finally gets around to paying for a redesign.
Ford is also to go through maintenance phases which aim at integrating VCHT improvements, and the Navy has cited similar upgrades on USS George H.W. Bush which minimized maintenance problems. Regarding the follow-on Ford-class carriers, the mundane query remains along with the catapults, elevators and sensors: will the deck systems be able to keep pace with the pace of operations up there?
